Step into the light

On the eve of a keynote I will deliver in Perth in mid April on the Future of the Accounting profession, here’s an article that was published in the April edition of Institute of Chartered Accountants “Charter” magazine:

The world of accounting will be revolutionised over the next 15 years with a fundamental move by most accountants away from the backline, with its focus on historic figures and tax compliance, to become a forward-looking well-informed wholistic business adviser on the frontline.

So says business futurist Morris Miselowski, who is speaking at an Institute of Chartered Accountants Conference in Perth on April 19.

Miselowski sees a futuristic world where employees work remotely and carry their offices with them in their mobile device which can be accessed anywhere in the world at any time.

“There will be an increasing reliance on accountants, with their detailed knowledge of their clients’ business, for information about how best to manage the business’s financial affairs. Accountants will have access to all of their clients’ relevant business details at their fingertips.

“Much of the mundane donkeywork needed for tax compliance will be outsourced and accountants will become specialist financial advisors who become an integral part of their clients’ thinking process.”

Miselowski says accountants will move from a reactionary role to a proactive role.

“In the past much of the work accountants have done is client-driven, reactionary and done after the fact. In 10-15 years they will be part of a process that works in tandem in real-time with business operators,” he says.

“By 2020 relationships between organizations, people and service providers will be far more intimate, accountants will be part of an individual’s advisory group and statutory requirements will be outsourced to some other country or person – that’s a fundamental shift.”

Accountants’ relationship with their clients will be significantly different.

Accountants who prosper in the world of the future will have moved beyond traditional taxation advice, playing a broader role in their clients’ businesses and offering more wholistic advice.

“In tomorrow’s business model clients will think ‘you are my financial advisor, you are part of my trusted tribe, you work in relationship with me and the others who advise me, you are constantly aware and on; I expect your advice when I ask for it but also at times when I don’t.’ Accountants will know that information because they will monitor their clients, with permission, in real time,” he says.

“This approach will apply to accountants working within a firm and those working externally within an accounting firm,” Miselowski says.

Much of the numberwork will be sent to workers in the future economic powerhouses of China and India. Bigger firms in the US already send up to 70 per cent of their tax compliance work offshore.

“Already book-keepers in India have good knowledge of tax laws in various countries around the world,” Miselowski says.

“The world will become a much smaller place and work will be routinely sent around the globe.”

While at pains to acknowledge that some accountants – particularly in big accounting firms or boutique accounting businesses – already have close relationships with their clients, Miselowski says by 2020 closer client relations would become the norm rather than the exception.

“The growth in the industry as we move into tomorrow will see accountants offer more than just numbers advice. They will offer business growth advice and bring in specialists to assist their client with other elements of their business,” he says.

“Large firms already act as a trusted advisor and offer specialists in various areas of business,” Miselowski says.

“We are already seeing the Big Four employing non-traditional employees – such as experts in online shopping and retailing and online digital advertising – because this is a space about which many of their clients are seeking advice.”

There will be a revolution of business across all levels, and its effects will be felt by accountants who work within a corporation or accounting firm, and in Australia and across the globe.

“Over the next 10 years we will see business change more significantly than we have in many hundreds of years. The financial/accounting world will evolve to meet new demands,” Miselowski says.

”There will be new jobs, a whole lot of new areas we create, and new industries.”

The pace of change in the past 20 years had been exponential, with it not being unusual these days for businesses to amass millions of customers within a year – a rate of unprecedented business.

“In the next 10 years we will move forward more than 100 years of technology and within 100 years we will move forward 1000 years of technology,” he says.

Miselowski says we are living a digital wild west, with few rules to guide us.

“We have moved into the virtual world and we now have an online world where every physical activity we do has an online equivalent,” he says.

Generation Y and Z, the next generation to take over business boardrooms, would have been raised in a virtual world. “They have grown up with computers and mobile devices and are incessantly on them. They see the world as simultaneously physical and virtual.”

Miselowski says technological advance has brought with it information (“we’re drowning in it from Google”); knowledge (“I can go to a blog and get someone else’s interpretation”) but to get wisdom an accountant would need to be consulted.

“What clients in the future will be wanting is the wisdom of someone with specialist knowledge at a time and place that is meaningful to them,” he says.

Advances in technology will allow accountants to mine and capture the number work.

“Accountants’ main role in the future will be in selling the interpretive wisdom. The wisdom sought will deliver different skills, different mindsets and offer different opportunities,” Miselowski says.

“Accountants will have to become good at interpreting information; work successfully with clients to inform them – sometimes in advance of their actions; and become adept at communication.”

He says the move to mobile access to information has already begun.

“We are moving away from a fixed computer and moving into a mobile world. Smart phones recognise where we are, who we are with, what we are doing and do all kinds of things at our behest. Bank accounts, share portfolios and other financial information will be connected in one space and will be able to give you advice, such as which credit card is best to use at this time.

“Within 10 years this will be absolutely normal. Accountants will be mining that information routinely and they’ll know all about their clients, their spending habits and what they have bought.”

Looking further into the future, Miselowski says by 2020 stemcells wil start to be used to grow organs and bones, travelling into space for tourism will be offered, an increasing number of today’s cancers would have been tamed, we will have an understanding of how the brain works and children born then will live for at least 120 years.

The accounting industry will also be involved in a revolution in the way people work, and predicts a third of the workers in the western world will work virtually and remotely by 2025.

Accountants will no longer be physically housed in a building, and won’t work 9-5 days.

“The notion of squeezing work in between the hours of 9am and 5pm is a nonsense. The business world will adopt a project and task model, whether accountants work internally or externally,” he says.

While the need for traditional numbercrunching accounting work will remain, today’s accounting practice business model will be turned on its head by 2025, he predicts.

“In the accounting world of the future numbercrunchers will be a small enclave rather than the totality. The current business model – which sees most accounting practices with a majority of numbercrunchers and the minority (partners) outreaching and outsourcing business – simply doesn’t make sense financially.”

His advice to today’s accountants in accounting firms is to find a specialist niche that can be sold or provided through an accounting or financial firm which is a growth area for the world in which they work.

He advises internal advisors to take on a generalist advisor role because that will also be needed. While there was limited room for businesses to continue to exist in their current narrow model, there was still a need for them, he says.

Future accounting practices will have extremely communicative consultants with a far closer and more intimate relationship with their clients and accountancy would become a much more advice-based people profession.

“Where once accountants saw their clients once or twice a year and interacted more with texts, books and notes, in the future they will be consulted much more often and interact much more with people,” Miselowski says.

“Accounting will become a complete customer interaction industry because there will no longer be any need for clients to use them ‘to get their books done’.”

He says accountants will continue their education by constant up-skilling because they will be custodian of their own career and predicts global accounting qualifications will begin around 2030.

He says the working world had changed vastly even in his lifetime.

“Generations X and Y have learnt, through watching their parents, that employment is short-term and loyalty is no longer required. There are a growing number of employees defined by the notion of six careers and 14 jobs in one lifetime.”
Miselowski notes the huge opportunities open to Australians keen to capitalise on the growth of the economic powerhouses of China and India.

“By 2025 China will be a dominant spending power on the planet and will have a large middle class. India’s growth in consumer demand will be about a decade or so later.

“Australia, in the Asia corridor, is placed perfectly to have a great influence on those economies. Geographically, it is close to most Asian countries and has better time zones than the US and UK.

“Australia also knows, from a financial/accounting perspective, how businesses will evolve. These countries are inviting Australia to share the business wisdom they have and that they are yet to gain.

“There are huge possibilities for Australians in those spaces”.

2012′s rising industries

This week Jason Jordan of 6PR Perth and I take a look as IBIS World’s annual predictions of the top industries which this year include diamond and gemstone mining, motor vehicle manufacturing, online education, biotechnology and online shopping.

Have a listen now:

and join us each Sunday at 5.05 p.m. (WST)

Teach it forward

Those entering the workforce today will have 6 distinct careers and 13 jobs. 60% of the work and tasks they will be doing in their 50 years career have not yet been invented. 30% of them will be working remotely using technology that has not yet been invented.

If tomorrow’s world offers a constant feast of change, new professions, tasks, work-styles and places then it doesn’t make sense to keep teaching our children only about old professions, work styles and methods.

That’s not to say that that what we were taught is not necessary, it is. But what we were taught was perfect for an employment world of career and employment certainty.

Today’s’ classrooms needs to go beyond the 3R’s to teach tomorrow’s leaders how to continuously problem solve, work collaboratively, work globally and seize opportunity.

In today’s radio segment Jason Jordan of Perth’s 6PR and I chatted about tomorrow’s education, the use of technology in the classroom, building classrooms of tomorrow and what new jobs lie ahead.

Listen to this weeks segment now:

and listen each Sunday at 4.40 p.m. (WST)

Postcards from the Future – Business 2020

I was recently asked by the Greater City of Dandenong to ponder on the future of business and work and decided to turn it into an article for them, which has just come out in there March – May edition of Stakeholder

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I’m sitting here in Dandenong in the year 2020 reflecting on my belief that in the last 20 years we’ve moved forward 100 technological years and contemplating where the journey has taken us and our businesses.

In 2020, by far the most fundamental change looking back is that we have all irrevocably moved our businesses and lives into a blended real world and cyberspace existence.

In the late 1990’s and 2000’s most businesses had static websites overflowing with promotional, informational and contact details, but by the end of 2010 a grassroots movement, many considered a fad then, had begun to take permanent hold – social business.

This new way of being and seeing transformed our cyber presence and websites from a flat one dimensional glorified online brochure into a multilayered user centric online portal that seamlessly mixed and included social media, online conversations, customer interactions, live chat, video conferencing with real time insights from staff, users, suppliers, stakeholders, prospects and others all available wherever and whenever we wanted it.

Today this has gone far beyond Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter, which in the early 2000’s hadn’t yet existed and by 2010 had become major online players and phenomena’s; to now in 2020 having become less important in their own right and more noted for having been the vanguards and innovators of what was to come.

We now take for granted our mobile computers (MC) and handheld devices that feed us real time information about the places we’re walking into and around. These devices have become our constantly-on personal assistant and speak seamlessly with the world around us on our behalf, negotiating travel routes, notifying us of who and what’s around and vetting and presenting the world to us in a way compatible with our ever changing needs and circumstances.

We now shift information, virtual products and services backwards and forwards on them with ease and little thought.

We use them to guide us through our lives, the streets, shopping malls and supermarket aisles. We use them to pay and get paid for all our products and services and they have become our cyber world’s virtual umbilical cord keeping us connected and up to date with our real world.

Our board rooms and offices have also transformed in the last decade as Baby Boomers have retired on mass. Gen X and Y’s have moved into the decision making roles and begun to steer the boardrooms around the world, guiding their Generation Z employees and lamenting how these new up and coming employees see the world and work so differently from the way they do.

The Manager of 2020 now oversees a diverse team of people and tasks. One third of their workforce does not work on-site and rarely, if ever, physically meets with their co-workers. They are often not even in the same country as the search for the best and brightest employees regularly sees us scouring the globe and employing people to work for us from wherever they are.

Today’s outstanding managers have learnt to juggle the demands of physical and virtual employees and worlds; is able to work in fast iterative cycles; is constantly reviewing and innovating products, services and procedures against a global “small village” background and knows that a profitable robust business is a seamless blend of off and on line activities.

Business models have also evolved. Where once we may have jealously guarded our intellectual property and unique know-how, we now seek ways to leverage and make best use of these by forming alliances with other business and providers servicing similar and complimentary markets, knowing that in this collaborative offering there is strength, growth and profitability for all partners.

Our Australian centric world view has increasingly come to include a solid focus on China and India as these two countries continue to flex their economic power and open up markets and opportunities to us that we had not had before.

New industries and new jobs have also evolved and the old adage that 60% of the jobs and tasks we will be doing in the next ten years still rings as true as it has for the last twenty years.

In the 2010’s the hot jobs included online community evangelists, gaming designers, organic farmers, financial and investment advisors and retirement consultants.

In 2020 we have a huge demand for telematics engineers, human organ designers and information forecasters.
In the past forty years we have lived through the eye of a technological revolution which has forever changed and reshaped our existence, the way we see ourselves, others and the world we live in.

It has flattened the globe and made it transparent giving us all the opportunity to see the world from our unique vantage point and to tap into people, places, thinking and products that previously only existed in the realms of science fiction and imagination.

This new way of being and seeing has demanded that we evolve the way we work and has insisted that we maintain a constant eye on the future.

We must celebrate what we have already achieved, but stand ready with the knowledge that what we have done and have achieved was perfect in its time, but that tomorrow it may no longer serve us as well.

As I look back on the last two decades and reflect on those businesses that have continued to thrive and grow they all share common characteristics. They are agile, know who and what they are giving them a strong core which allows them to flex easily as adversity and opportunity finds them and to take profitable advantage of whatever the future may offer.

A Dose of Virtual Reality

Do you remember Second Life? It’s a virtual world where people could live, fall in love, go to concerts — in fact do anything we do in the real world. I often wondered what was so wrong with the real world that people wanted to go there. And apparently some people still use it — perhaps they’re lost and can’t find their way out.

In today’s BTalk Phil Dobbie and I talk about how virtual worlds can actually be useful for business. We also talk about the idea of augmented reality, which is more likely to have traction and influence how products are bought and sold. It’s something that is likely to impact the way most businesses interact with their customer — and it’s already started to happen.

Subscribe to BTalk Australia on iTunes.

Radio ABC International – Today Show

Don’t trust everything you read online, Twitter talks to Microsoft and Google about data mining, using social media to choose amongst prospective employees, great website including xobni an email add on, Google Docs to replace Microsoft Office can also be used as a collaborative tool allowing many people to work simultaneously on one document and lots more as Morris Miselowski joins Adelaine, Zulfikar ABC Today Show’s co hosts and Phil in Hong Kong in their weekly Future Tech segment. Recorded live 9 October 2009.

Morris’s Key Note Social Media Address to SELLEN

On my return visit to SELLEN (South East Local Learning & Employment Network) I discussed what I see ahead for business over the next 5 -10 years and got to overview the social media phenomenon, what it is, how to make sense of it, how to “do it”, how to make money out of it and how others are doing it.

Sit back and listen to this live unedited 1 hour 22 minute presentation and question time (the audio file below takes about 1 minute to load up before it starts – so it’s not you, it’s the computer – but as they say all good things come to he (or she) who waits).

Entrepreneurs value ‘ideas’ over wealth

A study at the University of Liverpool has revealed that entrepreneurs are driven to start companies by their passion for ideas rather than the pursuit of wealth.

Researchers who asked entrepreneurs and small business leaders about their motivations for achieving business success found that only 6.9% were driven by financial reward.

Those surveyed cited a ‘lack of money to invest’ and the ‘fear of failure’ as barriers to starting up a business.

The survey was conducted by VentureNavigator – a state-of-the-art online service based at the University of Liverpool designed to help start-ups and small businesses improve their chances of success.

The research found the greatest motivator for entrepreneurs is passion about new ideas with 41.4 per cent of those surveyed citing this as their prime motivation for starting a business. 39.7 per cent were primarily driven by ‘wanting to be their own boss’.

Click here for full article

Morris Miselowski’s thoughts

To quote the wise one – Homer Simpson: derrrrr!

The vast majority of successful businesses (including Google, Microsoft and most others) I have ever come across were founded on a burning all consuming desire to bring to life an inner business demon that has possessed the entrepreneur.

Reward for effort is certainly important and greases the path ahead, but its main purpose is validation and an impetus to continue.

The overused and oft abused term “passion” is the bio fuel of choice by great entrepreneurs around the world.

The weirdest but most informative interview questions

The weirdest but most informative interview questions
you could ever ask an interviewee, and what they mean?

There are as many opinions and methods of conducting prospective employee interviews as there are shareholders in Telstra.

You could go “mano e mano” and take them on yourself, you could go panel style and invite a number of work colleagues to sit in and grill the applicant. You could get all the candidates together in a room and mass evaluate them. You could interview all the candidates once and then short list the best one or two and then re-interview those.

My personal favourite for senior vacancies is to bring the best candidate(s) in three times for three different interviews in three different places using three different interview styles. I find this gives you a true sense of the person you’re interviewing, their abilities and their commitment.

As to interview length, for a junior role you might allow between 30 – 45 minutes and for a more senior management role a two to three hour interview is not unusual.

Whatever interview style and method you choose, make it relevant to the position and your company. Run it on a pre-conceived agenda and evaluate it according to pre- defined criteria. This allows you to objectively compare “apples with apples” and ensure each candidate has had equal fair treatment.

During the interview mix up the questions, warm up by asking some straight forward questions to verify their qualifications, credentials and memberships.

Follow up by asking some probing questions to test their ability to problem solve and some open ended questions to see how they respond.

Don’t be afraid to ask the tough questions and never fear silence. Give the candidate plenty of time to think, frame and present their answers – you can learn just as much from their silence and thinking process as you can from their spoken words.

I am often asked about the sorts of questions you should ask and my answer is it depends on what answers you’re looking for, but here are some I prepared earlier:

If you wanted to test their ability to analyse, you might ask the candidate for an example of a difficult situation they managed to resolve. Was it resolved to the satisfaction of their boss? Did they see it coming and what skills did they use to overcome any obstacles in the way to its resolution. My analysis of this answer is to look for whether they have a reliance on fact or intuition and whether this aligns with the clients working style and needs.

To discover their leadership style, I might ask about an event that caused the candidate to re-evaluate how they led or managed their team, was it a permanent change or a one off. My take would be to look at whether the candidate understands their own management style, whether they are able to flex to other situation-appropriate styles and of course if that style is going to advance my client’s company.

Planning and organisation is huge part of any prospective job and questions like: Describe a re-organisation that has significantly affected your job and what was your part in it? This gives me insights into their ability to forward think, map out and manage situations and time.

Process and continuous improvement is the ability to follow the preset company methodology, but also just as importantly is their ability to innovate within the process where necessary. Questions like: “Tell me about a good process that you made even better”, or “tell me about a time when an existing process just didn’t work ”, will give you the clues you need to see whether they can “think outside the square”.

Getting to know how they react to personal objections can be elicited by asking: “What aspects of your work are you most often criticised for?” or “Tell me about a time you felt it necessary to act on an unpopular decision?”

I love to know what they know about the company they are interviewing with, so I’ll usually throw in a hand grenade like “What would you do differently if you ran this company?” and watch the sweat start pouring off their brow. If they’ve done their homework they’ll know enough about the company to venture an opinion. If they venture an opinion I can see how they frame answers to difficult and curly questions and the amount of squirming they do in responding to it, tells me how competent they are in awkward positions and at making difficult on the spot decisions.

One of the keys for me is to find commitment to their career path, so asking “If you could start all over again, what career direction would you take” would have me looking for reasoned arguments for sticking with their career choice and clear indicators of their past success and future triumphs.

Skills are also important, but in interviewing I take skills almost for granted. If they have applied, you have telephone interviewed them and short listed them, you need only confirm their skill set with questions like “Compared to others with a similar background in this area, how would you assess your technical skills” and wait for a list of key strengths and talents and the confidence with which they present these to you.

Interviewing is a blend of art and science. There are no golden rules, but remember you are not looking for a new drinking buddy; hopefully you’ve got friends for that.

You are looking for the person with the best skills, attitude and aptitude to do the job you need. You also want someone who is a few steps ahead of what you currently need, so that they can drive the position and the company forward, and not rely on you to do it for them, after all that’s what you’re going to pay them the big bucks for.

If you’d like a free copy of the complete e-book: “Forty (40) of the weirdest but most informative interview questions you can ever ask an interviewee, and what they mean”, email me at succeed@successthroughfocus.com